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Fostering data collection portal: guidance and troubleshooting

Updated 22 November 2024

Applies to England

Uploading your data

You can upload the data to the fostering data collection portal as many times as you like.

Each time you upload data, you are replacing the data stored in the portal - a successful upload will overwrite the previous copy you uploaded.

When the portal has read the uploaded data file it will display a table with the number of new/existing/removed records. You will be asked to confirm this matches your source data.

The portal is designed to perform the validation for you, so upload your data early and use the built-in reports to reduce the number of errors. To fix errors you can either:

1. Edit your data in your Excel template and re-upload again

2. Edit individual records in the portal using a web form (you may wish to extract a copy of the data for your own records)

Please save your data - the portal does not have an autosave function.

You can write up to 65,000 characters in webform comments boxes and in the template (so essentially, there’s no word limit).

Your site session will be live for approximately 24 hours. Please log yourself out when appropriate to make sure that unauthorised people cannot access data on your computer.

Case sensitive data

If you need to give a Yes/No/Unknown response, this should be case sensitive. Unfortunately, the system will only recognise “Yes”, “No” or “Unknown” responses, rather than “yes” or “YES”, for example.

Problems uploading your data

Please make sure that:

• you are uploading an Excel file
• your spreadsheet has correctly worded headers in the right order, matching the fostering data collection template
• if you have added any columns, you remove these before uploading

Removing records

You can’t remove records manually. Remove the record from your file and upload it again. You can download your submission from the portal if you need to.

Validation reports

The portal will validate your data automatically when you upload it. Some data errors may prevent a successful upload - the portal will give you a description of the errors and ask you to amend and upload again.

Select any error in the validation report to open the corresponding web form with all errors highlighted.

If you have a high number of errors, which may affect multiple records, we recommend you export the validation report to Excel. It is easier to view the Excel report and amend your data in the upload file than to use the portal web forms to correct multiple records.

Working with multiple datasets

You need to complete a separate form for each Ofsted-registered agency. You can see the name and URN (unique reference number) of the agency that is currently logged in on the bottom left of the screen.

Confirm your data

Once you are happy that the summary statistics reflect the true data for your agency, you need to get them confirmed.

Only people with full user permissions at your agency can do this. Unless you have told us otherwise, this will be the registered manager. Once they log in, they can select the grey ‘Confirm’ button at the bottom right of the summary statistics page.

Please email the Social Care Data and Analysis Team to change user permissions.

Submit your data

The final dataset needs to be submitted to Ofsted. This can only be done when there are no validation errors remaining and the data has been confirmed as accurate.

Only someone with full user permissions can submit the dataset (this is usually the registered manager, unless you have told us otherwise).

If there are still validation errors in your data, but your submission is accurate and correct, please email the Social Care Data team with an explanation of the circumstances behind the errors, and we can submit this for you.

The maximum length of the comments box on the final submission page is 1024 characters.

Please be aware that once you have submitted your final dataset, you cannot amend it.

However, you can log in afterwards and download your summary statistics in PDF format.

You will not get an email to confirm that you have completed the data collection, but your status will show as completed if you log in to the portal.

Passwords and logins

Your password will remain the same unless you change it. You don’t have to change it after a particular length of time.

Your login details will not change for next year’s data collection unless users request this or the Ofsted support team needs to change them.

Troubleshooting

Please use the most up to date version of Chrome, Firefox or Edge to access the fostering data collection portal. You can’t use Internet Explorer.

If you continue to have problems, check Problems uploading your data. You can also raise an issue.

Raising an issue

1. Go to your ‘inbox’ in the portal.
2. Click the green ‘create issue’ button.

If necessary, you can contact [email protected] or call 0300 013 0020.

We will not monitor the portal messaging system once the whole collection has finished. Please contact [email protected] directly between September and April.